Editors' Picks feeds

Editors' Picks enables you to provide up to five links to original news content you believe represents your organization’s best journalistic work at any given moment, and potentially have it displayed on the Google News homepage or select section pages. For instance, you might want to link to a slide show, video page, or topic page that Google News otherwise might not index.

We believe that Editors’ Picks will help readers follow their favorite news sources and discover other interesting sources they may not currently know. Readers can also easily express a preference for the sources they like, or indicate that they prefer not to see that source very often -- thereby building a more direct relationship with publishers.

To participate in Editors’ Picks as a publisher, you will need to create and submit a custom feed. The following are a handful of important guidelines about submitting and maintaining your feed. Please note that your publication must already be included in Google News in order to be in Editors' Picks.

General feed guidelines

We only accept news content for Editors’ Picks. Your picks should reflect the best pieces of journalism on your site at any given time! Do not include links to subscription offers, how-to articles, stock quotes, classified ads, weather forecasts, or the like.

We require a logo image to be linked in the feed. The image must follow these specifications:

Image dimensions must match one of two options:

Option 1: Height between 20 and 40px, Width of 250px

Option 2: Height of 40px, Width between 125 and 250px

Image must be .png format.

File size should only be as large as necessary, i.e. just a few KBs.

Logo background should be transparent.

Avoid any whitespace around the logo.

Please add at least one additional item to the feed every 48 hours. Feeds not updated at all within the last 48 hours will not be shown to users. Individual items in the feed can be older than 48 hours, as long as at least one item in the feed has been recently updated. Ideally, the feed would be updated once or twice per day.

We recommend that you provide an author name for each article. If you do skip the <dc:creator> (RSS) or <author> (Atom) tag, expect to see the byline of "<Publisher> Staff". The formatting you use will be reflected on Google News so we ask that you use standard capitalization and hyphenation for author names. For example, you should use "John Smith" rather than "JOHN SMITH." You do not need to include the word "by" within the <dc:creator> or <author> tags.

If possible, keep your headlines short. We truncate headlines in Editors’ Picks if they run beyond 75 characters.

We will only show articles from feeds containing at least three articles. If you include more than five articles, we will only display the top five articles in Editors’ Picks.

If you submit an Atom feed, you can provide the article link either in the link tag (i.e., link href=”http://www.newssite.com/article” rel=”alternate” type=”html/text”) or the <content> tag. Please be consistent for each entry throughout the feed. If you use both, we will extract the article URL from the link tag.

Submit your feed

If you've read all of the above and your site follows our general and technical Editors’ Picks feed guidelines, then you're ready to submit your RSS to our team!

To do so, open your news source in the Google News Publisher Center. To the right of your source name and URL, click Sections. Next, click the Add Editors’ Picks button towards the top of the screen. Next, enter the URL of your Editors’ Picks feed and click Submit. If there are issues with your feed, a message will appear explaining the error. Otherwise, your feed will be saved and sent to our team for final review.

If your feed meets our guidelines, we will start crawling your feed. Please note, pending our own quality measure and user feedback, we may re-review or disable your feed at any time.

Note: Each publisher can only add one Editors' Picks feed on our homepage. If you have already added your publication's homepage feed, you will no longer see the Add Editors' Picks
button available. However, section-based Editors' Picks are available in several of our sections. Learn More.

Feed traffic

To help you determine the traffic you receive from Editors’ Picks, we are appending the cgi parameter google_editors_picks=true to the URLs in your feed. Your webmaster should be able to view your traffic in Google Analytics using this parameter. More information on how to do so can be found here.

Remove your feed

To remove your Editors Picks’ feed, first click Sections. Next, click the tickbox next to the Editors’ Picks feed that you would like to delete and click the Delete Active button towards the top of the screen. We will stop crawling your feed within a few days, and you have one week to change your mind before the deletion becomes permanent. If you change your mind after one week, you can always re-submit your feed.